Objectives The R2F Value Stream represents a modern, consumption-driven engagement model and goes beyond the traditional IT service request management. It is a framework for connecting the various consumers (business users, IT practitioners, or end customers) with goods and services that they need to drive productivity and innovation. It fosters service consumption and fulfillment, service costing knowledge sharing, self-service support, and collaboration between communities of interest to improve the overall engagement experience with IT. Many organizations use multiple IT requests and/or Service Catalogs to address the needs of their consumers. The R2F Value Stream brings these different catalogs and consumer personas into a single consumption experience thereby eliminating the complexity and confusion consumers experience today. The goal of the R2F Value Stream is to provide a blueprint for creating a streamlined consumption experience that consistently engages consumers and eliminates the need for them to avoid working with their IT organization. The key to success with R2F is dependent upon two primary factors: - The ability to package deliverables as offers that consumers recognize and value, abstracting away confusing technology choices and complex fulfillment processes. This is accomplished by leveraging the Service Model to create Service Catalog Entries that can be instantiated and consumable offers that can be requested/ordered. - The ability to present and manage an inviting consumption experience that exposes a variety of opportunities to acquire services, goods, knowledge, and/or support. This requires organizations to go beyond the traditional IT request catalog solutions. The common limitations for current R2F practices include: - A service consumption experience that exposes technology resources and/or IT capabilities rather than valued services. - Multiple catalogs required for consumers to navigate in order to find and request available services. - Too many customer service requests requiring creation of fulfillment incidents, projects, and/or human intervention resulting in delays and an unfavorable experience overall. - Lack of service Subscription, Usage, and chargeback traceability. Business Value Proposition The R2F Value Stream places emphasis on time-to-value, repeatability, and consistency for consumers looking to request and obtain services from IT. It optimizes both service consumption and fulfillment experiences by delineating between the creation of offers and catalog aggregation and Service Catalog Entry composition. Today IT organizations struggle to increase the ratio of self-sourced services over workflow-based fulfillment requiring direct human intervention. Many fulfillments today require too much intervention that consumes valuable IT resources. By increasing self-sourcing, companies will see improved business velocity and reduction in friction. They will also be able to reduce “shadow-sourcing” within the lines of business because of a more responsive consumption experience. Today’s IT is focused on delivery of technical capabilities – tomorrow’s IT must be positioned to focus on facilitating consumption of multi-sourced services. The R2F Value Stream emphasizes the importance of deploying standard changes (a form of request management) rather than normal changes for internal fulfillments. Normal, risk-assessed and individually approved changes are one of the most time-consuming and resource-intensive activities in an enterprise-wide IT organization. Service fulfillments should be based on standard Service Models where request criteria and approvals are designed into the model and fully automated fulfillment processes orchestrate all necessary provisioning and Change Management. The R2F Value Stream plays an important role in helping IT organizations advance toward a service broker model. Such a model is dependent on the organization’s ability to leverage both internal and external sourcing options for satisfying consumer demand. Enterprise IT organizations have been using external suppliers for goods and services for many years. However, the multi-sourcing environment will become more complex as companies expand their use of cloud-based offerings. The R2F Value Stream enables the aggregation of catalogs and catalog entries from multiple providers into a single consumption experience. Therefore, while there is complexity on the delivery side in managing the various catalogs and catalog entries, it is not exposed to the consumer and the ordering experience is seamless and inviting. The R2F Value Stream also enables effective chargeback and service costing mechanisms, a key requirement in a multi-sourcing environment. The key value propositions for adopting the R2F Value Stream are: - Provides a blueprint for increasing business innovation velocity by facilitating a service consumption experience that allows consumers to easily find and subscribe to goods and services through a self-service engagement model. - Provides a functional framework that delineates between a single Offer Catalog and multiple Catalog Compositions to reduce complexity in the IT shopping experience. - Provides an architectural foundation for moving from traditional IT request management to service brokerage that increases both business and IT effectiveness. - Increased fulfillment efficiency and consistency through standard change deployment and automation. - Provides holistic visibility and traceability across service Subscription, Usage, and chargeback to improve IT Financial Management. - Enables increased cost optimization; for example, by canceling expired Subscriptions and reclaiming resources, Subscriptions, and/or licenses that are unused. Value Stream Definition The Request to Fulfill (R2F) Value Stream contains primary and secondary functional components. Primary functional components are core to the value stream and are essential for managing the service at this stage of its lifecycle. Secondary functional components are not dedicated to R2F but provide relevant data objects to primary functional components. R2F includes the following primary functional components that provide the technology necessary to support IT portfolio activities: - Offer Consumption - Offer Management - Catalog Composition - Request Rationalization - Fulfillment Execution - Usage - Chargeback/Showback - Knowledge & Collaboration A functional component utilizes an input data object to conduct key activities and may also provide output data objects to another functional component that requires that data. The R2F Value Stream primarily focuses on system of record integrations between two functional components like other value streams. However, the R2F Value Stream also includes system of engagement integrations enabling a common user experience or graphical user interface mash-up. The R2F Value Stream functional components with system of engagement integrations are the Engagement Experience Portal and Offer Consumption functional components. The Offer Consumption functional component integrations include system of engagement integrations with the following functional components: Offer Management, Request Rationalization, and Chargeback/Showback. The Engagement Experience Portal functional component is a secondary functional component since its scope can expand beyond the IT4IT Reference Architecture and into the business domain. It exposes and facilitates a unified engagement between consumers and the IT functions. The main objectives of the Engagement Experience Portal are to: - Drive the consumption through the Offer Catalog - Enable collaboration between communities of interest - Obtain support through a self-service interface - Access knowledge that enables them to be better informed about services offered by IT There may be other engagement experiences presented through the portal but this is the core set called out explicitly in the R2F Value Stream.